House Cleaning

 

          

      Ceres Bakery used to have—maybe still does—a series of metal baskets over the sinks, where we stored all of the utensils. Scoops of all sizes, spoons, forks, whisks, anything that would fit, was washed and tucked in the baskets to dry. It was usually a joyous chaos of stuff. Occasionally, someone would tidy it up, bringing like items together in a basket. That was usually a sign that their life felt a bit… messy…and they needed some small part of it to be orderly. Something, if only the cookie scoops, was in the right place.

                Weekends are the time to bring order back into the chaos of our house.  It’s a small space, so piles of paper build up quickly. Cat litter is dragged out of the bathroom; the cat, despite her tired back legs, still manages to thrust considerable litter onto the floor. Shoes cluster by the front and back doors. There are hats and socks in weird places. There may be chicken poop in the back hall from the bottom of our shoes and there is clearly mud. The recycling needs to go out and there is no food left in the fridge. Spiders move into undisturbed corners. Nothing is written in my planner and I have a deep and abiding suspicion that I have forgotten to do something or meet someone. I couldn’t just have an empty day….

                We divided the tasks. Mark did the laundry, including the huge sheet pile, while I washed the floors. He defrosted the freezer and we finally composted the second half of his birthday cake from last January 16th.  I put away piles of stuff and made a food plan, and we went to the Farmer’s Market and the co-op.  I even started the seed inventory. There is something deeply satisfying about bringing order back into our home; it has the same resonance as the scent of a crock pot full of cooking beans wafting into my bedroom at night.  All is right with this small section of the world—even if the cat has already pulled down the afghan I had so neatly folded over the back of the rocking chair.

Laurel prune

 

                January can be rough in the Willamette Valley.  It’s chilly, and wet, and there is mud everywhere, and the tires from cars have turned all the leaves into slippery piles of goo. There are indoor activities, like browsing seed catalogs, reading, and repairing chairs, but we need to get outside. The one thing I can do in the yard right now is prune. I start on one side of the yard, with the laurel, and work my way round: laurel, fig, apple, plum, grapes, lilac, hazelnuts, back yard laurel. I try and stagger the laurels because of the vast amounts of biomass a big pruning creates.  

                This year, it was the side yard laurel’s turn. I do it in January so it has time to fluff out before summer; the laurel is our best privacy screen. When I first became the caretaker of this hedge, I worried about pruning it too hard—would I kill it? But then one of my students, who was helping me paint the house, gave a section a huge whack job. “Don’t worry,” he assured me, as only 15 year old boy can, “It will be back.” He was right. Before we took down the garage, the roofline was my guide to the right height. This year, I went lower, below all of the other year’s trimmings.  I wanted to clean up the huge masses of gnarly branches and suckers, all holding dead leaves. With my beautiful new pruning saw, it was a project. Without it, it would have been impossible.

  

              Pruning the laurel is a three step process. First, I work on our side of the hedge, pushing all of the branches back. Then I bring everything that I can reach down to the right height. This requires considerable ladder maneuvering and long reaches across the surface, stretching and pulling branches towards me while I saw madly. I toss all of the trimmings behind me into the yard, away from the ladder (I’ve learned a bit after tripping on a few over the years.).  Once I have brought down and pushed back about two thirds of the hedge—which takes two sessions—I clear up the mess, hauling most of the green branches back to the compost pile and cutting up the heavy logs for the street compost cart.

                Today, I finished the other side of the hedge. The neighbors moved their car so that they way was clear. In less than an hour, I had it all down and out of the driveway—a new record. Mark cut it up and moved the brush while I sawed and worked the loppers. It’s not perfectly even and there are few dead branches poking up that I still need to pull out, but it is done, just before the rain started up again.

New to Us Rocking Chair

 

Last summer, I acquired a small rocking chair for free; the landlords were moving shop and I admired it. “Take it,” she said. “Then we don’t have to move it.” Mark and I carried it home and I put it in the shade by the greenhouse. All summer, the cat and I traded places on the old cushions. When the rains began, I moved it into the greenhouse until I realized that the fabric was rotting away, so I brought it in for a refresh.  Winter Break is the perfect time for such a project.

1.       Choose the paint. I went for the deep golden yellow of my bookshelves in the Cozy Room. That way, it will blend into the room if I wanted it there.

2.       Find a new cushion—for three dollars, I nabbed a lovely cushion from the thrift shop across from the paint store.

3.       Strip off the old fabric, after taking photos.

4.       Remove the small tacks holding the skirt on. Chisel some out….watch your hands.

5.       Put the chair in the tub for a bath.

6.       Lightly sand the whole thing.

7.       Move into the dining room and prime it. Wait 36 hours for the primer to dry in the chilly room. Be sure to leave some areas, hidden from view, uncovered so that you can still know what the original color was.

8.       First coat of yellow paint, also in the dining room. Another 36 hours to dry…move the chair into the house for the second coat.

9.       While waiting for the paint to dry, cover the two cushions with some old blue fabric that was the living room curtains several years ago. Also, use the last bits of fabric from the couch refurb to make the skirt.

10.   Replace the burlap that covered the springs and protected the cushions.

11.   Tack the skirt on and tie the cushions down. This time, they can come off, so, if the chair is in the greenhouse, the cushions can travel in and out, depending upon weather and dampness.

12.  

Bask in the new seat in front of the fire. Argue with the cat on whose spot it is.

 

 

Solstice Shelter

   

             The week before Yule (AKA Winter Break) is often a scramble. Juniors are madly rewriting papers and demanding help on the thesi—help that was due the week before, quite often—while the younger students are finishing up projects they stalled a bit on, and admin is trying to hold one more staff meeting. Add three council sessions, one work session before the final meeting of the term, and trying to find time to set up and decorate the tree, and it was a busy week or so. And then the first day of Break was Solstice, without a great deal of prep time.

                Friday night, we finally decorated the tree. It had been in the stand since Tuesday evening, but, because it is a big tree with a crooked base, it took us three times as long as usual to set it up, and we were starving by the time it was braced in the living room, so we left it dark. On Wednesday morning, I draped the lights over the branches while eating toast and perched the angel on the top. The rest had to wait. Friday evening, I rolled out pizza dough to rise and we went to work with the ornaments. It was covered in time for dinner; afterwards, I packed up the box, heaved it into the attic, and cleared out the ladder from the cosy room. Before we went to bed, I started a pot of local black beans for soup.

                Saturday was Solstice. It started with tea and watching the little birds—juncos and finches, mostly, with one towhee and a couple of jays—descend on the ladder feeder outside the living room window.  They were already lined up on the plum tree when I went out with the seed. After breakfast, I prepped our dinner, set up the fire, and found the new candles and old holders. Mark filled the lanterns and washed dishes. We watched the clouds break and flashes of sunlight across the bay tree while we worked. When I went to bring in a couple of clay pots from the greenhouse, I realized that the chairs stored inside were the perfect place to sit and read, so we did.

                After lunch, we went for our traditional walk around the wildlife refuge—clouds were heavy, backed up against the foothills of the coast range. Hail and rain drenched us for about 15 minutes, but the air was warm, so we kept on going. Being outside on the short, cloudy grey days keeps us sane, if damp. After our walk, we changed clothes and headed downtown to the ceremony in remembrance of those who have died on our streets this year—at least sixteen names, just in our town, from being unsheltered.  

We came home, lit the fire, ate our dinner, moved the elderly cat from lap to lap, and dried out our clothes from the day. In our yard, the rabbit burrowed down into his pile of straw, looking for the last bits of apple and the chickens climbed up on their safe perch for the night. Even in the busyness of the world, we are sheltered.

Advent

 

               Even though I am no longer catholic—or any sort of organized religion—this time between Thanksgiving and Solstice remains a sacred part of the year. Advent. The days are still growing shorter and colder; I find myself starting dinner at four thirty, rather than six PM, as I do in summer.  The chickens are down late and up early, but still chowing to stay warm. Their feathers are all back from the fall molt. Mr Beezhold stays in the hutch in the morning, waiting for the ground to warm up. We sleep later, buried under piles of blankets, jump up to turn on the heat, and return to bed while the house warms on weekend mornings. On clear afternoons, the bare branches reach for the sky, stark against the dying light.  When it is cloudy or foggy, everything is hidden. Living so far north, the darkness feels longer and deeper than it did when I was a child.

                We spend  afternoons, when it is dry enough, on long walks in the woods. I gather green branches for the mantel. We consider the wide range of fungi that are sprouting up on logs, on trees, in the pathway itself, and how the ice storm last year opened up sections of the preserve for more light. Rushes are now growing by the trail in standing water. Where did that come from? A few catkins are beginning to stretch out but there are no blooms. And it is quiet. So quiet.  

                What have we learned in the past year? What did we do right? What would we like to change, if we could? These three weeks have become an accounting of the year.  We wait, in hope, in peace, for the return of the sun on Solstice night.

Seasonal Records

 

                As we move towards the end of the year, further and further into the dark last days, I reach for rituals, daily, weekly, monthly.  I have two books and one box that help ground me in the circles of the years.

                The first is my paired set of the Book of Days. Back when I worked at Ceres Bakery and lived in Portsmouth, I stepped back from the established holiday rituals, especially around Christmas, and considered what was more important to me and my need for connection and reduced material consumption. I learned about the old pagan ways of Northern Europe, considered some Jewish holidays, and did some historical research. While I worked, I made notes in two big blank books—one runs from March until August, the other from September to February.  I made little sketches and borders and wrote everything down, along with when I first heard peepers and some seasonal recipes. These books still rest on my desk and I pull them out to record significant events, usually in the natural world, even now.

                The second book is a white binder, which has a page for every week of the year. This is the Garden notebook. I track planting dates, weather events, and harvests week by week, all year long. I can tell you that, this week, has been a traditional time to move the coop from one bed to the next, has had several years of big rain, and others of dank fog. Lots of mulching is finishing up during week 47. I also keep the garden maps and the seed orders from past years as well as a page of notes for the coming season.   It has resolved several arguments and helped track sowing schedules!

                Finally, I have a recipe box that is divided into eight sections—one for each cross quarter day. Each small season has recipes specific to what is ripe then, making seasonal, local veg recipe planning much easier. Sometimes I move a recipe from one section to another; sometimes a recipe spans several seasons; sometimes one is misfiled for a year and I have to hunt for it. But, overall, it works. It helps us revel in what is available and fresh now and not miss what we cannot have.  I have also spread some cookie recipes out through the year so that they are more special.

                Each book allows me—actually requires me—to focus on what is happening in the world right now and consider what I can and cannot control. I am able, in the words of Thoreau, to Live Deliberately and to suck out all of the marrow of life and not, when it comes time to die, to find that I have not lived.

 

 

 

Spartan Garden

 

                This fall, Green Club has take on the school garden in a big way. It had fallen deep into weedy disrepair in the last year or so; there was no time to work in it with last year’s schedule. This year, I changed mine to eliminate an advisor class and now, on Fridays, about a dozen students and I head out cross the football field to the school garden patch.  It is amazing what twelve people can get done in 40 minutes—more work than I can do in six or seven hours. We go out in the grey drizzle, feeling powerful in the face of bad weather, and walk back to school laughing when we are done, damp.

·         We’ve pulled all of the big weeds (the small ones are still there).

·         We have filled the yard debris barrel over and over again.  We could use another.

·         We have hacked back the blackberries that reach through the fence because they are rooted between a fence and a garage.

·         We have broken down the ancient non-functional  compost bins and replaced them with hoops.

·         We have pulled most of the grapevines out of the arbor vita—the rest is waiting for a ladder and a day without anyone else around.

·         We have laid a thick layer of leaf mulch over most of the garden beds in two large swaths.

·         We have rescued strawberries that were in the path and they are now in the back of my classroom waiting for a new bed.

·         We have planted two fava beds.

·         We wrote a grant for six raised beds and six benches which would have a huge impact upon the space.

·         We have transplanted all of the native plants that were along the chain link fence line into the area around Dixon Creek with all of the other natives.

It looks a LOT better. But, there is still:

·       

  Greenhouse needs to be repaired and bricks laid down as a floor.

·         The trellis over the entrance needs to be rebuilt.

·         More mulching and weeding.

·         The fridge in the shed needs to go away—it works, if you want to haul it!

·         Weed trees need to come down.

·         Plant the line between the garden and the football field with pollinator plants so that it is clear that the neglected patch by the cross country shed is not our problem.

·         Blueberry bushes! Raspberry vines!

·         Glow up the scarecrow! Fix the stained glass garden art! Make pretty signs!